At the start of the year we revealed that Texas based developers Certain Affinity were working on a new project tentatively called Transformers Online and now the game has been officially announced for PC and consoles.
The game has been in production since 2017 when Activision lost the license to produce games based on the 30 year old franchise and has been confirmed to a be a third person shooter based in the G1 era of Transformers. The game will be free to play but will only be available in China, which is a bit of a downer.
Japanese games often make their way west, games from China, Korea, and other locales rarely do the same. However, given the huge affinity for the Transformers brand there’s always a small chance the game could expand to other territories, I’ve dropped a tweet in the direction of Certain Affinity to see if they could give me a little more information.
Certain Affinity may not be a familiar studio but you have probably played a game they have worked on including numerous entries in the Halo series, Doom, and Left 4 Dead. They have previously released Age of Booty via Capcom on last gen consoles and are also working on their own IP, Last Expedition for current gen consoles and PC.
At present there are no Transformers games available to buy in the West, when Activision’s license expired Fall and War of Cybertron, Transformers: Devastation, and games based on the Michael Bay movies were all removed from digital stores. The last game to be released was a rather quick port of Transformers: Fall Of Cybertron for current generation consoles, it was very basic and was a straight port rather than a remaster.
Most of the recent Transformers games were created by the now defunct High Moon, but Platinum games also had a stab and created Transformers: Devastation, which was a bit short, but a rather fine reproduction of the 1980’s cartoon with plenty of classic beat ’em action.
China has already had a game called Transformers Online, but it was based on the movie continuity and was shut down a few years ago.
Source: TFW2005
